Commonplace book

orig. A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.1578 COOPERThesaurus A studious yong man ... may gather to himselfe good furniture both of words and approved phrases ... and to make to his use as it were a common place booke. 1642 FULLERHoly & Prof. St. A Common-place-book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field.

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Friday, October 02, 2009

Speaking of depressing novels, Natasha Wimmer in the Nationnominates Mercè Rodoreda’s Time of the Doves (1962), part of the “small canon of coming-of-age novels by Catalan women.”

I tried to intensify the flavor of 21st century fiction by reducing it to five titles, but the opposite approach is pursued at the Millions, where one hundred and twenty books are said to be among the century’s best. Or, in other words, you can quit your other reading and concentrate only on the fiction of the last decade and you still won’t be done till some time next year. Daniel Green is properly aloof, sniffing that such exercises as these “assume that anything remotely useful can be accomplished by making lists and choosing up sides.”

Miriam Burstein, continuing to demonstrate how a book blog might be used to advance literary scholarship, attends to a work of “anti-Anglo-Catholic fiction”—Elizabeth Jane Whately’s Maude (1869). As she says elsewhere, Burstein reads these books so that you and I don’t have to. A blessing on her head!

Observing that “Knowledge is a form of attentiveness,” Patrick Kurp reflects on the literary attitude that unites Elizabeth Bishop and Dawn Powell.

Oscar Wilde’s “groundbreaking work of criticism” Intentions (1905), recently reprinted by the Cornell University Library, is exposited generously at Hungry Like the Woolf.

Open Letters Monthly is out with its bestseller issue, including reviews of Russo’s That Old Cape Magic, Pat Conroy’s South of Broad, and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson.

The Scotsmansurveys the literary history of Edinburgh, “the world’s first official city of literature.”

If only because of the reaction it will provoke on the literary Left, you’ve got to appreciate this book jacket.

Finally, if you have not yet read William Kristol’s eulogy to his late father Irving Kristol, you owe it to yourself to do so. That a father could inspire such a tribute from a son is deeply moving, no matter what your politics.

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D. G. Myers

A critic and literary historian for nearly a quarter of a century at Texas A&M and Ohio State universities, I am the author of The Elephants Teach and ex-fiction critic for Commentary. I have also written for Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, First Things, the Daily Beast, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Literary History, and other journals. Here is the Commonplace Blog’s statement of principles, such as they are.